Reply to post: 3Mbps?

London's Gatwick Airport flies back to the future as screens fail

Cynic_999

3Mbps?

Seems a bit of overkill, and implies that each screen is fully refreshed individually whenever the slightest thing changes. If the displays had a tiny bit of intelligence so as to all use the same raw flight information which they format and scroll themselves, a 500Bd link (at the most) would be more than sufficient. I shouldn't think that all the information needed to be displayed on any screen would take more than 50 bytes per flight, so even at 10 bits per character (e.g. 8 data, 1 start, 1 stop), 500Bd would be able to handle 1 new flight per second, which is at least 2 orders of magnitude faster than aircraft arrive & depart, so historical information can easily be interleaved between new flight data for initialisation of freshly powered-up screens. Thus already powered screens would update within 2 seconds of new flight information becoming available, and a freshly powered-up screen would be fully populated with a list of flights in under 2 minutes.

Compared to the rest of the hardware costs, a simple CPU and a few KB of RAM would be an insignificant cost. Add a radio receiver and a 500Bd radio link could be implemented that needs no cabling to the screens other than plugging into the mains.

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